The Optometric Minute

Building a Pediatrics & Vision Therapy Specialty

Jan. 20, 2016

Jessi Lee, OD, advises doing a demographic analysis to locate an area with young families before building a specialty in pediatrics and vision therapy. Establish the value of your services, and referrals will come from parents, community groups and school connections.

Launch a Pediatrics Specialty
Grow a Vision Therapy Practice

Jessi Lee, OD, of Park Slope Eye in Brooklyn, N.Y., recommends looking at the demographics of practices you are thinking of joining. If you are interested in launching a pediatric practice with vision therapy, as she was, it helps to have a practice with many young couples.

Grow via word-of-mouth. The greatest tool to marketing a new pediatric niche is word of mouth. “The biggest thing to growing vision therapy is word-of-mouth because once you help out one child, parents are going to start to talk, and send other children in,” says Dr. Lee.

Educate parents. Once parents understand the benefits of vision therapy, they are often eager for their child to try it. “One of the expectations coming in was that I would have to do a lot to convince people why vision therapy was needed,” says Dr. Lee. “But parents in this demographic are very interested in almost holistic ways of life. So, if they hear surgery for their child or vision therapy, they want to avoid surgery.”

Get referrals from occupational therapists. “One of our biggest referral sources was an occupational therapist who was already a patient of ours and familiar with vision therapy, and as soon as she knew it was something we could provide, she started sending over a good deal of patients.”

Promote via social media & parent’s groups. “The biggest thing we’ve done to promote our vision therapy services is regular Facebook posts,” says Dr. Lee. “We’ve also worked with a parent’s group, where we’ve done advertisements, and set up some contacts.”

Sometimes even children who are excelling can be helped by vision therapy, notes Dr. Lee. “In order for the children to perform at that level, it’s taking an immense amount of effort for those children to overcome their visual issue. So, if you can do something to make their parent’s life a little bit easier, you’re going to have a patient for life.”

Participate in InfantSee. Note expectant couples, and reach out to them after their child is born. “Sometimes we’ll put a reminder in that patient’s chart if they say they’re six months away. I won’t send out the reminder right when the child’s born because the parents are very busy at that time, but we do it just to be aware and follow-up with them to let them know InfantSee is a service available to them,” says Dr. Lee, who lets new parents know about her pediatrics specialty, and that their baby is eligible for a complimentary exam within the first year of his or her life.

Help parents stay compliant. Vision therapy requires the buy-in of both parents and child. Fortunately, parents, who must invest a lot of time and money into it, are usually eager for their child to follow through with all of the required exercises.

“Vision therapy is most certainly a team effort where the parent needs to be aware of everything their child is doing, and they also have to understand why they’re doing it, so they don’t just think it’s a silly thing that’s taking up more of their child’s time,” says Dr. Lee. “They have to understand how each exercise helps out with one aspect of vision. So, after each session, I fill out a homework schedule sheet, and I go over each activity with the child and the parent, so we’re all on the same page.”

Celebrate progress. “At the progress evaluation, we have a list of goals and achievements that a child may have noticed,” says Dr. Lee. “One of the big ones is less time spent on homework, less frustrations, less headaches, less complaining about homework.”

Start small. If you’re a single doctor in a single office launching a vision therapy niche, start small. “You want to make sure you are providing a quality product,” says Dr. Lee. “When you start to stretch yourself too thin, and have lapses, that’s going to get not the best word-of-mouth out. So, you start small, filled with good cases, and then, over time, it will grow naturally.”

Jessi Lee, OD,  practices at Park Slope Eye in Brooklyn, N.Y. To contact her: dr.jessilee@parkslopeeye.com.working

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